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Notes on Walter Benjamin & Allegory

Written for A Grad Interdisciplinary Seminar Spring, 1997
Amended Fall, 2003 for Grad Seminar on the Arcades Project

"Allegory is in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things."
-Walter Benjamin

Notes on Walter Benjamin and Allegory

Benjamin’s inquiries into allegory had two phases. The first was from his early period
and centered on 17th century Baroque; the second was from his later work and culminated
in The Arcades Project, which dealt with the allegories of the modern.
The reason to look at Benjamin's ideas about Baroque allegory is for his critique of it and
to see how he differentiated it from later Modern allegory. I'm going to start with a quote
from Susan Buck-Morss in her study of The Arcades Project, The Dialectics of Seeing:

"The Baroque poets saw in transitory nature an allegory for human history, in which the
latter appeared, not as divine plan or chain of events on a 'road to salvation,' but as death,
ruin, catastrophe; and it was this essentially philosophical attitude that gave allegory a
claim beyond mere aesthetic device. The forsakeness of nature, understood as a
theological truth, was a source of the melancholy of the allegoricists. "The steadfastness
which expresses itself in the intention of mourning is born out of loyalty to the world of
things." But it is a world of 'dead objects', a realm of 'infinite hopelessness.' In it, political
action is judged as mere arbitrary intrigue."

It's this last statement that's most important for our purposes because it describes
allegory as a mode of contemplation and not one of action (activism). "In it political
action is judged as merely arbitrary." This is a system of thought and of allegorical
representation that allows hell to exist here on earth. It accomplishes this by presenting
evil as allegory, nothing more, in order to illustrate the glory of redemption that is
possible in the future. Evil, exists only in relation to spirituality–to redemption.
Benjamin’s critique of Baroque allegory is that it is not an allegory of the here and now.
Again quoting Buck-morss "...allegory deserts both history and nature and (like the whole
tradition of idealist philosophy that comes after it), takes refuge in the spirit." In other
words, Baroque allegory removes evil from the world by portraying it as allegory: as not
real. Another quote–this time from Benjamin: "Evil as such–exists only in allegory, is
nothing other than allegory, and means something other than it is. It means in fact
precisely the nonexistence of what it presents. The absolute vices, as exemplified by
tyrants and intriguers are allegories. They are not real [...]." In order to remain true to their
god, the Baroque allegoricist was forced to turn his back on the world, rejecting both
nature and politics.

In his study of the Baroque it is precisely this passivity and rejection of a dialectic or
activist position that Benjamin laments in 17th century German allegory. He sees it as a
missed opportunity. Benjamin says: "[allegory in the name of redemption] loses
everything that was most its own." Quoting from a text of 1652 he writes, "Weeping, we
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scattered seed on the fallow ground, and sadly we went away." He comments, "Allegory
went away empty-handed." "When the allegorist declares evil as 'self-delusion' and
material nature as 'not real', then for all practical purposes allegory becomes
indistinguishable from myth." Allegory, therefore, is not an interpretive system of
representation but is, instead, an ontological dead end. It was this problem with Baroque
allegory (its other worldiness) that brought Benjamin to study the 'commodity allegories'
of 19th century Paris, which he found so clearly articulated in the work of Charles
Baudelaire.

The Arcades Project comes to us today as a massive collection of notes on 19th century
industrial culture in Paris. One of its major interests to artists is its methodology which is
fragmentary, collaged, aphoristic, and imagist. It is, in short, a philosophical project
whose structure is allegorical. Benjamin's interest in Baudelaire had to do with the way
the poet collected the scraps of his time as a means of constructing allegories of the
Modern: "in order to express the universal, human problem of evil within the changed
context of Modern Life." Benjamin saw in his allegorical process a dialectic that was
transformable, not only in the sense of transforming life into art but in transforming art
back into life.

In his earlier study of the Baroque, Benjamin had said that allegory comes to prominence
at times of great social upheaval and disintegration. One of the things that had attracted
him to an analysis of the allegory of Baudelaire was that his was constructed not during a
period of disintegration but at a time of apparent optimism and progress. It was the era of
the first department stores, the grand boulevards of Hausmann's Paris, the invention of
architectural steel: a time of magnificent material and industrial progress. But, for
Baudelaire, this splendor was vacuous and even worse, destructive, and it became the
source for his allegories of destruction, melancholy, and despair. He was responding to
the change-as-progress of the urban phantasmagoria, which he exposed as being
mythological and empty. His method was to take the symbols of mythology (the swan
for example – images from antiquity) and use them, not to enhance commodity myths
(Marx's term) but to undermine them. The myths that are being undermined are those of
progress, of materialism, and of the commodity. Benjamin saw in this method a way to
revitalize allegory. In the hands of Baudelaire, allegory was a social weapon carried in an
aesthetic sheath. It expressed the hollowing out of the commodity: the commodity as
shell and its myth as delusion. "The allegories [in Baudelaire's poems] stand for what the
commodity has made out of the experiences that people in this century have had."
(Benjamin) Which is more commodity.

Adromache, I think of you! The stream,

The poor, sad mirror where in bygone days
Shone all the majesty of your widowed grief,
The lying Simoïs flooded by your tears,
Made all my fertile memory blossom forth
As I passed by the new-built Carrousel.
Old Paris is no more (a town, alas,
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Changes more quickly than man's heart may change);
Yet in my mind I still can see the booths;
The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals;
The grass; the stones all over-green with moss;
The débris, and the square-set heaps of tiles.

There a menagerie was once outspread;

And there I saw, one morning at the hour
When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky,
And the road roars upon the silent air,
A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked
On the dry pavement with his webby feet,
And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground.
And near a waterless stream the piteous swan
Opened his beak, and bathing in the dust
His nervous wings, he cried (his heart the while
Filled with a vision of his own fair lake):
"O water, when then wilt thou come in rain?
Lightning, when wilt thou glitter?"

Sometimes yet
I see the hapless bird -- strange, fatal myth--
Like him that Ovid writes of, lifting up
Unto the cruelly blue, ironic heavens,
With stretched, convulsive neck a thirsty face,
As though he sent reproaches up to God!

II.

Paris may change; my melancholy is fixed.

New palaces, and scaffoldings, and blocks,
And suburbs old, are symbols all to me
Whose memories are as heavy as a stone.
And so, before the Louvre, to vex my soul,
The image came of my majestic swan
With his mad gestures, foolish and sublime,
As of an exile whom one great desire
Gnaws with no truce. And then I thought of you,
Andromache! torn from your hero's arms;
Beneath the hand of Pyrrhus in his pride;
Bent o'er an empty tomb in ecstasy;
Widow of Hector -- wife of Helenus!
And of the negress, wan and phthisical,
Tramping the mud, and with her haggard eyes
Seeking beyond the mighty walls of fog
The absent palm-trees of proud Africa;
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Of all who lose that which they never find;
Of all who drink of tears; all whom grey grief
Gives suck to as the kindly wolf gave suck;
Of meagre orphans who like blossoms fade.
And one old Memory like a crying horn
Sounds through the forest where my soul is lost . . .
I think of sailors on some isle forgotten;
Of captives; vanquished . . . and of many more.
-Charles Baudelaire, The Swan

Now I want to talk little bit about the commodity, at least as it relates to Banjamin and
his interest in the commodity as a vehicle for allegory. I quote Benjamin quoting Marx:
"With its price tag the commodity enters the market. If its substantive quality and
individuality create the incentive to buy, for the social evaluation of its worth this is
totally unimportant. The commodity has become an abstraction. Once it has escaped
from the hand of its producers and is freed from its real particularity, it has ceased to be a
product controlled by human beings. It has taken on 'phantom-like objectivity,' and leads
its own life. A commodity appears at first glance a self-sufficient, trivial thing. Its
analysis shows that it is a bewildering thing, full of metaphysical subtleties and
theological capers." I quote Buck-morss: "[I]f the social value (hence the meaning) of
commodities is their price, this does not prevent them from being appropriated by
consumers as wish images within the emblem books of their private dream world.” For
this to occur, estrangement of the commodities from their initial meaning as use-values
produced by human labor is in fact a prerequisite. It is after all the nature of the allegorical
object that once the initial hollowing out of meaning has occurred a new signification has
been arbitrarily inserted into it, this meaning "can at any time be removed in favor of any
other." Adorno described the process this way: "'[...T]he alienated objects become
hollowed out and draw meanings as ciphers. Subjectivity takes control of them by loading
them with intentions of wish and anxiety'" –Benjamin added: "To these thoughts it should
be noted that in the nineteenth century the number of 'hollowed-out objects' increases in a
mass tempo previously unknown.'” My addendum: It would not be an exaggeration to
say that the hollowing out of the 19th century seems at a snail's pace when seen in the
light of our own time.

The Allegorical Impulse In Our Own Time

The importance of allegory for us lies in its understanding of and ability to decipher
cultural/historical myths. For the contemporary artist, allegory can be a way of turning
commodity culture inside out, in the same way that Baudelarian allegories exposed the
emptiness of the dream image by exposing the myth of the commodity phantasmagoria.

Could there be two phases to this activist or dialectic process: a phase one that exposes
the emptied dream and a phase two that replaces the emptied dream with a new one? Is
there an allegorical poetics that can accomplish this? Or are the only dreams left to us
commodified dreams?
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As a way of responding to this question I am going to proceed by responding to some
comments made by Craig Owens in his essay "The Allegorical Impulse"

"Allegory is an attitude as well as a technique, a perception as well as a procedure. It

occurs wherever one text is doubled by another. One text is read through another. The
paradigm for the allegorical work is the palimpsest."
My response: the world can be turned into a text, or, more accurately, into a series of
texts, which exist one on top of the other. Each text may allow an independent reading,
but the most dynamic and relevant readings occur where the texts overlap and intersect.
This reveals the spaces in-between. It is where the most ephemeral meanings can be
found. It is the domain of interpretation, dialecticism, and poetry.

"Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist does not invent images but
confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter. And
in his hands the image becomes something other. He does not restore an original meaning
that may have been lost or obscured; allegory is not hermeneutics. Rather he adds another
meaning to an image. If he adds, however, he does so only to replace: the allegorical
meaning supplants an antecedent one; it is a supplement."
My response: Confiscation or appropriation are not, in themselves, adequate. Particularly
when those techniques can be quickly dismissed as nothing more than style.
Appropriation must include a dialectic allegoricism that allows interpretation.

"Allegory is consistently attracted to the fragmentary, the imperfect, the incomplete."

My response: Allegory often conflates the visual and the verbal. By turning images into
language (interpretation) and by turning language into images (advertising).

"Allegory is synthetic and crosses aesthetic and material boundaries as well as stylistic
categories: Appropriation, site-specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity,
hybridization–these diverse strategies characterize much of the art of the present and
distinguish it from its modernist predecessors.
My response: Allegory is a way to proceed because it recognizes the intolerable
confusion of signs and the resulting shifts of meaning that permeate our lives.

"It is, of course, in allegory that 'one and the same object can as easily signify a virtue as a
vice and this forever problematizes the activity of reading which must forever remain
suspended in its own uncertainty."
My response: An allegorical process recognizes uncertainty and, instead of being alarmed
by it, embraces it and makes it substantial.

Allegory is the act of recognizing and embracing the space in between: emptiness, borders,
margins, detritus. It is this process which allows the dream beyond the commodity to be
constructed.

Cultural artifacts become fragments that can be arranged into countless texts. Allegory is
the means by which the text is reordered (or disordered). The new reading of the
disordered text becomes the act of interpretation: the point where new meanings are
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assigned. It was Duchamp who introduced this discursive process into the visual arts. In
the Readymades, for example, art is transformed from visual to textual. From history to
discourse. From impersonal third person narrative to direct address. One confronts in
Duchamp and in much contemporary work what Rosalind Krauss describes as "[a]
tremendous arbitrariness with regard to meaning, a breakdown of...the linguistic sign." The
spectator becomes reader of what Duchamp called, "the allegorical appearance of objects."

A quote from Robert Smithson:

"The names of minerals and the minerals themselves do not differ from each other,
because at the bottom of both the material and the print is the beginning of an abysmal
number of fissures. Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and
ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of
faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void."